Google has entered into the holiday season in a festive mood. Mountain View is celebrating the fact that its Android Market has reached ten billion downloads, accelerating to a rate of one billion downloads a month since July.

Those are impressive numbers for sure, and speak to the market penetration that Android is enjoying. To say thanks to the users that made a milestone like that possible, Google has worked with different developers to offer ten apps for ten days at 10 cents a piece.

Having used most of those titles, I can say that these are not junk apps in the least. Indeed Minecraft alone is a steal at the 10 cents mark.

This event is another sign of the recent explosion of the smartphone industry. Compared with Apple’s App Store at 15 billion downloads as of last Summer, Android is on track to continue to enjoy enormous success in the mobile market. The key will be to attract the quality of developer that Apple has, and to leverage the Ice Cream Sandwich update to create some new, novel ideas.

Apple’s dominance is illustrated in the fact that in the same time frame that it took Android to grow to this point, the App Store did 5 billion more downloads. Either way you look at it, the competition for the mobile dollar is fierce.

Be on the lookout for the next nine days to see which apps Google is going to discount next.